Gabe Ortiz

Gabe Ortiz, whom Brandon Walker’s household familiarly calls Fat Crack, is a retired Tohono O’odham Tribal Chairman, medicine man, and trusted family friend whose influence joins the book’s investigative and spiritual strands. He is not only a link between Brandon and Emma Orozco’s search for answers about her daughter, but also a mentor to Lani Walker. His illness makes the limits of help and the meaning of care immediate, while his guidance passes on a tradition that shapes Lani’s recovery and sense of belonging.

Identity and Background

Gabe Ortiz and his wife, Wanda Ortiz, have been longtime friends of the Walker and Ladd household. Within that family, Gabe is usually known by the familiar name Fat Crack, or Gihg Tahpani; Brandon avoids using it when speaking with Emma Orozco, wary of implying an intimacy that would be inappropriate in that conversation. The difference between a public form of address and a household name marks the particular closeness Gabe has with Brandon’s family without making it a license to presume familiarity elsewhere.

Gabe is a retired Tribal Chairman and a respected Tohono O’odham medicine man. His path into medicine was not presented as an uncomplicated pursuit: in middle age, and with reluctance, he answered a summons to take up the role. He is also a student of Christian Science. The novel therefore presents his practice through a meeting of traditions rather than as a simple opposition between Indigenous healing and Christianity.

Illness and Chosen Care

A few months before Brandon visits him, Gabe has been diagnosed with diabetes. The disease is prevalent enough on the reservation to be known as the Papago Plague. Gabe declines care from Indian Health Service physicians, resisting the prospect of injections and pills. Instead, he attempts to manage his condition through diet and exercise and through a regimen that draws on both Mary Baker Eddy’s teachings and Native American medicine.

Lani, home from her pre-med studies at the University of North Dakota for Christmas, reacts with alarm. She believes her godfather should be under a doctor’s care, but he will not consider it. This disagreement gives their closeness a difficult edge: her concern does not give her power to change his decision, and his refusal does not erase the care that binds them. When Brandon later visits, Gabe is blind and openly acknowledges that he is old and dying. He says that if he could walk, he might follow the example of Looks at Nothing and go alone into the desert; he also worries about being a burden on Wanda, whom he believes the situation weighs on more heavily than it does on him. He then redirects the conversation. His condition is serious, but he does not let it displace the reason Brandon has come.

Mentorship and the e lihmhun

Gabe’s bond with Lani is both familial and spiritual: he and Wanda are her godparents, and she has always been especially close to him. After Lani kills Mitch Johnson, she undergoes the required sixteen-day fasting and purification ceremony, the e lihmhun. Gabe visits her every day, bringing soothing salve and the salt-free evening meal required during the fast. Their care for one another is practical as well as ceremonial; he attends to her needs throughout the period, while their conversations give her a trusted companion during a demanding time.

On the ceremony’s final night, Gabe brings his huashomi, a fringed buckskin medicine pouch passed to him by the blind medicine man S’ab Neid Pi Has, also known as Looks at Nothing. After they eat, Gabe draws a circle around himself and Lani. He opens the pouch, takes out wild tobacco, makes a rough cigarette, and lights it with Looks at Nothing’s old Zippo lighter. Inside the circle, Gabe and Lani share Peace Smoke for the first time. The scene makes the pouch a vessel of inherited practice: its passage from Looks at Nothing to Gabe, and its appearance beside Lani, places her within a continuity of teaching rather than leaving her alone with the aftermath of violence.

The smoke leaves Lani light-headed, and she remembers some of the conversation only indistinctly, while other parts remain clear. The ceremony does not make her experience easy or resolve it by explanation. Instead, Gabe’s presence, the shared meal, the circle, and the inherited pouch give the period a structure in which difficult questions can be asked. His mentorship is conveyed through repeated acts of care and the careful transmission of a practice.

Gabe and Brandon’s Friendship

Gabe and Brandon have been friends for decades. Their familiarity appears in ordinary details as well as in serious conversation: while ill, Gabe relays that Diana Ladd has asked about buying tamales and tortillas from Wanda, reminding Brandon not to forget them on his way home. The exchange gives their friendship a domestic texture, even as Gabe’s declining health casts a shadow over the visit.

Brandon comes to see him after Emma Orozco has asked for help finding her daughter’s killer. Gabe already knows about Emma’s request, and his questions lead Brandon to acknowledge both that the case is more than thirty years old and that he initially hesitated to take it on. Brandon’s habit of avoiding direct questions, informed by his understanding that they can be impolite among the Tohono O’odham, also reflects the care with which he approaches Emma’s account. Gabe is not shown investigating the case himself; his importance lies in the trusted connection that brings the matter to Brandon and in the conversation that helps Brandon face what the work will mean.

The Case and Gabe’s Narrative Significance

Gabe’s influence becomes consequential when Brandon accepts responsibility for shepherding Emma’s case through The Last Chance. Brandon recognizes that his renewed work has restored his life and purpose, but that his excitement is inseparable from Emma’s long grief. Gabe’s connection to the case thus sets two forms of need beside each other: Brandon’s need for meaningful work and Emma’s need to learn what happened to her daughter. The novel does not treat one as compensation for the other.

The investigation also unfolds against a history of institutional neglect. Roseanne Orozco’s presumed murder on reservation land fell under the responsibility of the FBI or local tribal police, unlike the off-reservation murder of Gina Antone, which belonged to the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. The Papago Tribal Police Force lacked training, equipment, and money, and investigations into reservation murders were often cursory. Gabe’s place in this story is not as a substitute investigator, but as a community figure whose trust and knowledge help reopen a case that institutions failed to resolve.

His knowledge of a health-records study provides another concrete link between community resources and the investigation. Gabe had told Brandon that an Arizona State University grant in the early 1990s led to existing health records from the Indian Health Services hospital in Sells being entered into computers. The study, which included records reaching back to the 1950s, examined longevity and causes of death among Tohono O’odham people; together with money from tribal casino operations, it was also among the reasons the hospital later had a kidney dialysis center. That information suggests that records of Roseanne’s July 1970 appendectomy should exist, although their availability does not guarantee access. In the novel, Gabe’s value is therefore also informational: he remembers how the records came to be collected and points Brandon toward a possible source without pretending that an archive is automatically open to him.

Gabe’s narrative role rests on connection rather than control. His decisions about his own care remain his, even as Lani fears their consequences; his guidance offers Lani a form of inheritance, while his friendship helps Brandon return to work that matters. Through him, the novel connects healing, family obligation, cultural continuity, and the pursuit of justice without suggesting that any one of them can erase illness, grief, or institutional failure.